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RAINBOW CONNECTION

November 19, 2014

Takashi Murakami’s latest exhibition, “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” so generously feeds psychedelic spectacle to the pilgrims who flock to Gagosian Gallery’s Chelsea flagship that measuring the show by standards other than volume of Instagram posts seems inadequate. The task we’re left with? Take it all in: a mural longer than a tennis court bursting with figures and details; a pair of towering, cartoonish demons with baroque musculature and Popeye biceps; a full-size ancient Japanese temple gate that might have come straight off a Cinecittà soundstage — and that’s just half the works in one of the exhibition’s four rooms. Elsewhere in the show, in works based on Edo-period (1603–1868) paintings in turn based on Chinese precedents, Murakami shows us his ability to repurpose the old and make it utterly of-the-moment.